10/05/2021

(AU The Guardian) AGL Takes Greenpeace To Court Over Use Of Its Logo In ‘Biggest Climate Polluter’ Campaign

The Guardian - 

Energy giant objects to use of its logo on posters and online advertising that use phrases like ‘generating pollution for generations’

Protesters against AGL’s natural gas import terminal in Victoria. The company has launched legal proceedings to have its logo removed from a Greenpeace climate campaign. Photograph: Melanie Burton/Reuters

Energy giant AGL has launched legal action against Greenpeace Australia Pacific over a campaign that targets the company as Australia’s biggest corporate greenhouse gas emitter.

It comes after the environment group launched a report and campaign with posters and online advertising that feature AGL’s logo and phrases such as “generating pollution for generations” and “Still Australia’s biggest climate polluter”.

AGL has commenced legal proceedings in the federal court and is seeking to have its logos removed from the campaign, alleging copyright infringement.

Victoria blocks AGL's gas terminal on environmental grounds. Read more

Greenpeace Australia Pacific has labelled the legal bid an attempt to stifle organisations that highlight the damage fossil fuel companies are causing to the climate.

The environment group said it would argue it is fair use of the logo because the campaign featured it for the purpose of satirical criticism “of the dissonance between AGL’s public relations statements and its lack of action on climate change”.

A directions hearing is set down for Tuesday.

AGL has rejected the suggestion it is seeking to shut down public debate.

“AGL reserves its rights to defend its brand under Australian law,” a spokesman said.

“We have no intention to stifle public debate. The legal application seeks to prevent unlawful use of our brand as part of a third party campaign and is not intended to silence the campaign itself.”

Katrina Bullock, the general counsel for Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said the case could be important in determining the extent to which charities and non-government organisations could run campaigns of the kind launched by Greenpeace “without fearing litigation”.

“Legal tactics like the ones AGL are using are the kind of tactic multibillion-dollar fossil fuel companies use … to try to tie up the resources of anyone who speaks out against them,” she said.

AGL says it will link bosses’ bonuses to lowering emissions. Read more
Glenn Walker, the senior campaigner for Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said the legal bid was an attempt to sink the environment group’s campaign but “the truth is on our side”.

“AGL likes to slap a wind turbine on their ads to hide their dirty coal pollution, and now they’re trying to slap a lawsuit on us to keep us quiet,” he said.

“This is yet another attempt by the coal industry to stop grassroots organisations from exposing the damage that it is doing to the climate, to the environment and to human health.”

AGL is Australia’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter, reporting more than 40m tonnes of scope 1 emissions in 2019-20, more than double the next largest emitter.

Last year, AGL announced it would begin linking executive bonuses to lowering emissions from the start of the 2021-22 financial year.

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(AU Canberra Times) Australia Remains In A Climate Transition Muddle

Canberra Times - John Hewson

FRUSTRATING: Endless political point-scoring and blame-shifting is wasting precious time. Picture: Shutterstock

Author
Dr John Hewson AM is an honorary professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, and is a former leader of the Liberal Party.
Anyone looking in on Australia's response to the climate challenge would be justifiably confused and dismayed.

Much worse if they had tuned in to Scott Morrison's comments to the recent Biden climate summit.

If they are able to cut through the rhetoric, spin, claim and counterclaim, misrepresentation and fake news of the so-called political climate wars - mostly point-scoring and blame-shifting with little genuine policy development or implementation - they would find themselves being buffeted around almost daily by a multiplicity of media reports of various targets, projects and technologies, with considerable difficulty determining their significance.

At best, they would be bemused and disturbed, by all this white noise in a country that has everything going for it to provide it with the best basics to lead the world in transition to a low-carbon society by mid-century.

We have enviable endowments of land, solar, wind, graphite, lithium and recyclable wastes, with the technologies to exploit them for the essential transitions across all sectors.

Rather than being tagged globally as a most conspicuous laggard in our response to climate, we could easily be a globally significant leader - an energy superpower.

It's a muddle, with several decades squandered at the cost of billions of dollars of investment and growth, and hundreds of thousands of jobs, yet leaving us exposed to ever more frequent and intense extreme weather events, and the rapidly mounting costs of their impacts.

With the disturbing vacuum in national political leadership failing to put in place an effective longer-term strategy for the essential transitions, the states, businesses, households and key institutions have stepped up, attempting to fill the void.

For example, against Morrison's mere "preference" to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, the states, many businesses and key industrial and other organisations have adopted the target as a firm commitment.

Moreover, as Morrison sticks with the totally inadequate 2030 target to reduce emissions by 26-28 per cent - less than half what is required to achieve 2050 net zero - Victoria has now moved to 28-33 per cent by 2025, and 45-50 per cent by 2030.

While Morrison scaremongers about this, it is easily achievable with appropriate transition thinking and planning.

For example, Victoria could accelerate the closure of the coal-fired Loy Yang B and Yallourn power stations, and/or incentivise the transition of households from gas-fired heating and cooking.

It would be so much better if the responses were unified and consistent across the country, especially as actions taken by some may complicate the whole system.

For example, Australia has the highest and fastest rollout of roof top solar in the world. But this means that power prices often sink to zero or negative around midday, as with wind often at night, but rocket up in the evening and morning peaks.

This has changed the business model of solar and wind projects, especially as they can no longer count on the subsidy from the Renewable Energy Target.

The Australian Energy Market Operator is now recognising locational disadvantages by imposing marginal loss factors on their output.

Consequently, there is a considerable industry shake-up under way, with many of these projects now on the market at substantial discounts.

These projects now need to be made dispatchable with load-shifting storage.

Denying the commercial reality that solar and wind generation are cheaper, with negligible emissions, and are readily bankable and insurable, Morrison is pushing ahead supporting gas generation, potentially stranded assets.

At best, gas will only have a role as a "peaker", the limit of which has been put at about 200MW.

Yet we have seen federal and state government financial support for two much larger gas projects in Tallawarra and Kurri Kurri in New South Wales in just the last week.

Hydrogen has become the flavour of the moment, even though we are a long way from seeing it commercially viable at scale.

Green hydrogen is too expensive in power generation even if the government achieves its technology goal of $2/kg, foreshadowing a better future in transport, and as a diesel replacement.

The move towards 100 per cent renewables has been constrained by the fact that coal-fired power was built near coal mines, and solar and wind projects where the sun and wind were best - not actually where it was most needed.

The states are now competing in transition.

Australia desperately needs leadership - and a national and co-ordinated approach to the transition - across all key sectors, power, transport, regenerative agriculture, building codes and materials and industrial processes.

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(Newsweek) Australia Isn't Doing Enough To Address Climate Change | Opinion

Newsweek - 

Demonstrators hold up placards outside the Australian Open during a climate protest rally in Melbourne on Jan. 24. Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images

Author
Cat Woods is a freelance writer based in Australia. She writes on art, culture and travel for international publications, and regularly writes on music for both U.S. and Australian publications.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Australia should receive a mighty "F" for its failure to confront climate change—our churlish government is in denial.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison's blustering, factually questionable presentation at the recent Leaders Summit on Climate exposed to the world how embarrassingly ill-prepared Australia is for the social, economic and environmental impact of its reliance on coal and water-intensive agriculture.

Likely, the forests won't burn down, sea levels won't swallow up our neighbors in the Pacific and lead to major wars over scarce resources in Morrison's lifetime nor in the lifetime of his government, so who can blame him for being so disinterested in the plight of Australians now, and for generations to come?



A report by think tanks including the NewClimate Institute, the Climate Action Network and Germanwatch measured emissions, renewable energy, energy use and policy across 57 countries in 2019.

The resulting 2020 Climate Change Performance Index ranked Australia as one of the worst, rating 0.0, on climate policy. The yearly report, published since 2005, is an independent monitoring tool used to track countries' climate protection performance.

The report noted the urgency of meeting targets, plans to reach those targets and genuine commitment to phasing out harmful use of fossil fuels—all relating to rising temperatures and increasing lack of predictability of seasons and weather.

Extreme weather in 2019, including Cyclone Idai which overwhelmed Mozambique, a record-breaking heatwave in India months later and the destructive bushfires in Australia all provide evidence of fundamental change in climate.

Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, made up of various emergency service agencies, departments and non-government organizations around Australia, said it will take decades to appreciate the economic costs of the 2020 bushfires on the economy.

"What we can safely say, with weeks left to go, is that these fires are by far Australia's costliest natural disaster," researchers Paul Reid and Richard Denniss said on Australia's academic editorial site, The Conversation. According to them, the cost of the bushfires was close to 100 billion Australian dollars.

Australia does not exist as an island though, if you'll forgive the pun. Our policies and actions—or inaction—on climate has direct consequences for other nations. The Pacific islands, our closest neighbors, are extremely vulnerable to climate change.

According to the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), the direct results of sea temperatures rising due to ice caps melting include loss of coastal infrastructure—many islands in the Pacific are low-lying.

More intense storms, floods, cyclones and droughts are predicted, along with the failure of subsistence crops and coastal fisheries, loss of coral reefs and the spread of diseases like cholera, typhoid, malaria and dengue due to saltwater and floods contaminating freshwater supplies.

Morrison's speech at the Leaders Summit included the claim, "We are also providing $1.5 billion in practical climate finance focusing on our blue Pacific family partners in our region." This amount was already factored into the existing aid budget. It is not an additional amount.

In 2019, Australia ended its contributions to the U.N.'s Green Climate Fund, designed to enable richer nations assist low-income countries to cut their emissions.

Morrison's speech (and the dubious accuracy of his claims) did not impress Australian academics who focus on climate issues.

"[The prime minister should] stop misleading citizens and perplexing climate diplomats about Australia's climate policy performance by making up numbers that bear no relationship to the international recognized system of measuring national emissions under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change," said Robyn Eckersley, a political science professor at the University of Melbourne.

She shared how Morrison should address climate change.

"Acknowledge that Australia is especially vulnerable to climate change, and that the cost of early and aggressive action is cheap—with many co-benefits—when compared to the cost of not acting."

Eckersley said that Australia should stop subsidizing fossil fuels, develop a transition plan for all coal mines and coal-fired plants, enact climate legislation that includes interim and long-term targets based on advice from an independent statutory committee and commit to a target of 100 percent renewable electricity by 2035.

She also recommended Morrison reinstate contributions to the U.N.'s Green Climate Fund.

Professor Hilary Bambrick, head of school at the School of Public Health and Social Work at the Queensland University of Technology, shared similar thoughts. Her research focuses on the health impacts of climate variability and change.

"Australia is continuing to fail in climate leadership," she said. "Addiction to fossil fuels, demonstrated to the world by PM Morrison at the climate summit, is bad for climate and it's bad for our health.

We need to urgently ramp up our investment in clean renewable energy to have a healthy, livable future. Australia continues to spruik its woefully inadequate reduction targets and at the same time promote new fossil fuel developments in coal and gas.

If we don't make deep and urgent cuts to fossil fuel emissions, we will increasingly see catastrophes of the scale of, and beyond, the black summer fires."

As other nations rise to the challenge and intend to meet ambitious targets set by President Joe Biden for 2030, Australia's prime minister missed his opportunity to show the world that Australia is serious when it comes to combating climate change.

If only Australians voted leaders in on their policies beyond the next election.

Next year may be our chance to elect someone who is serious about addressing climate change.

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